


Inescapable

by hypnoshatesme



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Introspection, past child neglet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:40:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26289619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypnoshatesme/pseuds/hypnoshatesme
Summary: Gerry reflects on how much of his old life still clings to him even after he died.
Kudos: 7





	Inescapable

It had taken a long time for Gerry to get used to the pain. And getting used to it wasn't the right way to put it. Eventually, he had realised he could scream all he wanted, there was no relief, no change. His throat hurt the way a memory did and Gerry knew he was dead. But he didn’t entirely feel it. It was ridiculous, of course, Gerry couldn't know how it felt to be dead. But he knew, somehow, that this was wrong. He knew it the way he used to know when one of the Fears was getting up to something close-by, when the Watcher would bring him to one place or another only for Gerry to realise he had no idea why he had gone there as soon as he arrived. Until this anxious feeling settled in his stomach. Until, later, he could see the traces, the marks left by the entities. 

This felt nothing like it, because nothing felt like anything but pain, but Gerry still found himself reminded of it. He wandered, or at least he thought he did, the darkness he found himself in. It wasn't the Dark, Gerry had ran into that kind of solid, less-than-absence-of-light darkness and this wasn't it. This was...nothing. He couldn't feel his feet hitting the floor, or feel them at all really. He couldn't see anything, couldn't see why every movement felt so strange, why he could barely tell whether he was moving at all. Everything felt empty and heavy, a kind of finality to it. It felt like the End. Maybe that's why Gerry was so sure he was dead. Just as sure as he was that this wasn’t proper death. 

Or was he so sure? Maybe he wished it were true. Gerry had always hoped for blissful nothing after death. If it turned out to instead be all-encompassing pain and darkness...well, it sounded just like his luck, really.

He only realised what happened the first time he was read out and found himself in a world that seemed very much like it had before, except he felt strange in it, the changes much more palpable when he found himself standing in a room rather than in vast darkness. Everything looked the same around him, though he didn't recognise his surroundings or the people looking at him in shock. When he looked down at himself, however, he wasn't quite there. Not quite fully translucent, but not solid, either. His voice had a ghostly quality to it when he asked what was going on. His eyes fell on the book before he got an answer. 

Gerry knew that book well, had seen his mother hold it many times, watched her add a page more than once. The page laying open now had his name. Gerry suddenly wasn't seeing very well anymore. He felt nauseous, or whatever the closest thing to it he was able to feel now. He didn't even hear what the people who had read him out were talking about. It wouldn’t stay like that for long, but that first time - and even the following ones and, somewhere in the back of his mind, even later on - he was transfixed on that familiar book, nothing else in the room reaching him. 

Not that much could reach him. Gerry soon found out that his body wasn't solid at all. He could hear and see but that was about it. Gerry didn't care. He missed the time he was still overwhelmed by the pain. Because now he couldn’t stop thinking of the irony of finding himself in that book. A Leitner. One he would have destroyed had he ever gotten his fingers on it, just like he had done with the others. There was truly no escape from the books for him, not even in death. In a way, this was the most intertwined his existence had ever been with one of them. He was  _ part of one _ , part of one of the books he worked the better part of his life trying to get rid of. The part of his life he had finally been choosing what to do himself. 

Gerry knew he'd never get them all, but still, being bound into one hit hard. It was a bitter not-taste, to look at that page, to read it. Gerry's memories of actually dying were foggy, painkillers and the aftermath of the seizures making everything fuzzy. So reading those words felt strange, disjointed. 

Reading it in that book, the book he had seen his mother look at with the closest he had ever seen on her face to love, some sort of twisted affection, was worse. It was worse because it made him wonder if now she would look at him like that, or at all. It was horrible because Gerry, somewhere deep, found himself craving it still, wishing she were there to see him, now part of what she loved all her life and he hated for all of his. And he hated himself for it. Hated that even after all this time, even in death, his mother was still such a presence in his not-life, that he still found himself wishing for her attention, craving something, anything from her but the anger and disappointment he had gotten from her at the end, when she was like him now, but not quite right. Even more wrong. Anything more than the fleeting glances he got from her when he tried his best to live to her satisfaction.  Anything close to how she looked at those damned books.


End file.
